How to Find the Average of a Group Using Positives & Negatives

Finding the average of a group using positive and negatives is something that you can do with a list of transactions. Find the average of a group using positive and negatives with help from an experienced math professional in this free video clip.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Ryan Ault, I'm a physicist, and this is how to find the average of a group using positives and negatives. Now we can think of a list of transactions, and a monetary value associated with each one. Now we can label transactions as one, two, three, four and let's say we make a total of five transactions. For each transaction, it can have either a positive or a negative dollar amount associated with it. If it's negative, you're losing money, if it's positive, you're gaining money. So let's say transaction one is just one dollar. Transaction two can be about two, or one fifty, 1.5 dollars. Transaction three can be negative one. Four, negative two dollars. And five, we can just say it is zero dollars. Okay? And now if we want to find the average of this, it's just simply the transaction dollar amount, so one plus one fifty, plus negative one, plus negative two, and plus this last transaction zero, which we don't even need to write. So it was a null transaction. And we can divide this by the total number of transactions. So in our case, it is five. And we find that the average dollar amount per transaction is equal to one plus 1.5, which is 2.5, minus one minus two over five, and this part just becomes negative three, and we find it's equal to negative 0.5 over five, which is equal to negative 0.1. So we find that our average is actually negative 10 cents per transaction. I'm Ryan Ault, and this is finding an average with negative and positive numbers.